Server farms aren't cars. If they were you would have a point. There are a number of problems that you just can't work out until things go live as there is no way to simulate "live". Beta's can get close, but not all the way. Cars are much simpler (there are millions of lines of code working here), have been somewhat unchanged for many many years (tech is still moving VERY fast so the software technology hasn't been being in use for decades to get to that point), and you can test a car in *harder* than real life at a race track (for us nothing is rougher than live).

It is mostly software in general. It is why the place I work can and has to charge 150k for a piece of software. We do mission critical (911, credit cards, etc) where losses and fines can exceed 1 million a minute of downtime. If they could even develop a testing cycle such as ours for such a large project (ours tend to be narrow in scope - do one thing and do that well) it would take decades to get out. Heck, we are still shipping products on OS's from 6-10 years ago because of that.

It may not be right, it may suck - but it is reality. I'm sure someone that happens to wander into a den of hungry lions feels it isn't right (and I would agree), yet they still get ate for supper. Reality tends to trump anything we feel about situations like this being right or wrong. It will take a month or so to get most of these things worked out and until/unless this type of project becomes canned software it will always be thus.

Since im in the industry i can talk about this. it is not only possible it can be done, It takes proper planning and execution of that plan. You haqve to properly scope out. It also takes folks in IT that KNOW what they are doing. What normally gets in the way of this is budget. Most likely they are running on a shoestring budget and need the $$ from release to buy new servers and beef them up. the other item you have to consider is they most likely under spec the server due to cost. Sun servers arent cheap, even if running enterprise Linux if your admins dont have allot of experiance with them they will crash due to misconfiguration. Thats just the hardware side of it. Now lets talk software development. All it takes to crash a server is an improperly index databse. If the indexing is off or not properly done they coudl crash the servers by player load and by running a simple query. It could also be the code. Another is thier pipe to the internet. Hopefully they have at minimum a DS3, they really need OC3 or higher.

I've been apart of many MMO's, this one feels lik e SOE is behind the scenes pulling the trigger because the response from Dev team and relations folks are as lacking here as it was with SOE. Right now I'm Strongly considering asking for a refund of lifetime membership and purchase of the game. Not because of the game, the game when it is up is great. It's the innability to keep the servers up that makes me wonder how much play time i will have. I work 8-12 hours a day and when i get home this is stress relief for me. SO out of 7 days will it be up for only 3? Not worth it in my book and the LACK of communication from Cryptic gives me warm fuzzys inside.